by Mary Padilla
Is that what it is, then?
Something that puts in motion
a sort of cascade? Personal?
Write it down
before it slips away.
Such things don’t usually
need setting up.
They come into being
by themselves. Impersonal.
Maybe the pieces aren’t ready
to be locked into place yet.
To need to do this thing,
but not necessarily
because it’s likely to succeed,
It’s an exchange with the part that
observes, integrates,and only manifests
when the synthesis is complete,
to wake up with it in mind,
and live with it always before you,
as a sort of waking dream –
like the cuckoo in the clock
that makes its presence known
only intermittently – rarely –
then quickly disappears again.
when the fit is on, you must do it.
And so you discharge it, this necessity,
It won’t be coaxed out again
until it has something else to say,
and that fully formulated.
deliver it in the doing.
Or don’t, but then it will persist.
This sort of thing doesn’t – can’t – happen
on demand, under contract, or by a deadline.
Not exactly taken over,
haunted, preoccupied, obsessed,
you simply must pursue it,
if you are possessed by it,
or it just might destroy you.
It just bubbles up
when it’s ready
and can no longer be contained.
Not its agent,
but rather reduced to it.
All that can be done is
to give it the time it needs,
as everything else is stripped away,
superfluous to what it in essence is,
this thing that can exist only through you.
and then record the result
What matters is the essential need
for this inessential thing,
meaningful perhaps only to you,
to be,
when it’s ready
and to continue being,
to be delivered.
even after you no longer are.
Since coming to the LP2 several years ago, Mary has been trying new things, like applying the economy of the poetic form to expressing what can be more felt than understood.